Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 7 of 7: On New Beginnings

(This isn't quite right but so it goes...)

We begin. We fail, we become depressed, we hit new year’s, we quit, we move, we have a crush on your mom…we begin again. Beginnings are a puzzling phenomenon, when everything, again, becomes new. In a simple way such changes make clear the difference between humanity and any notion of a single “world out there”.

But in any case—and this is the core of my argument—it is important to have positions. Your life is your position, your direction, your railroad tracks, and you can begin again. And just as by beginning again you have a new world, so too, we can construct the world we want for all of us, we can build the relationships, the networks, and the institutions to make it happen. And this is my life, so if you ever want to try to figure something out, my info will be out there so long as facebook is on the air.

And EXCO, however fragile and with however far to go, is only the beginning. Yet this project speaks to what I would like to see in how we organize our creation. We do so in a way that gives us and other regular people the power. We do so in a way such that there are not people who serve others and those who are served but that our collective liberation is built into the same project. We are all teachers and learners…all our humanities are at stake. We do so in a way that creates spaces and builds communities and encourage people to find ways to use those resources to fit their needs, goals, and projects. We find a small, beautiful idea, tend it, nurture it, figure out the kinks, and spread it everywhere like what should be done with flowers and food and hemp and friendship.

This is what I want to do in the Twin Cities, and then throughout the world.

And this process is work. It requires recognition of how we as people are living so as to prevent other people from being people, and how we’ve always known we were doing this and how we always hide it from ourselves. It requires desiring. It requires patience, and dedication to a task that doesn’t allow us to bask in the wonder of spontaneity, the practical naivety of believing that everything is equally important. It requires seeing evil and not dying. It is helped by a belief in the impossible, a willingness to hold onto it, and perhaps a willingness to see what capital and the State think autonomy looks like…us bleeding in the road.

But listen.

You live. You have ideas, desires, good vibes, visions. You know that a world built on speaking bullshit is bound to be pretty crappy. You know people who know people. To be passionate is simply to have a desire and hold onto it, to give it breath in your life.

Your life is your position. You have already begun. If you want, begin again.

david “the imf/world” boehnke can be contacted at db(at)riseup(dot)net

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 6 of 7: On Singing

Today, Wednesday the 20th, has been a day of songs. I sang Jewish songs of freedom and gratitude to God as I walked to school; an uncomprehended language speaking strongly in my ears, and lungs and walk. Later, in the upstairs of Weyerhauser, I sang “Macalester is anti-war, oh how I long to be in that number, Macalester is anti-war, go Mac!” smiling to the various higher-ups whose heads peaked out from their offices, or to the associate deans of students who for whatever reason felt the need to be unrequested chaperones.

And we don’t need chaperones or rulers or war, but we do need singing. I think of the Kantian enlightenment in which our staff and faculty and presidents and parents live their lives—think whatever you want but obey.

And that is not what we live for. We don’t live our lives to be thinking robots, to think different but be same all the same, trapped and broken as we are, whether we’re buttered up with health care or bags of cash, or left counting on luck to avoid dying uncared for in a hospital lobby. And we don’t live only to be what the world needs, or what our families need, or what our parents in the law or the kind, sickening bureaucrats and the smiling-corporate-fucks tell us we need to become. And there is too much of that on this campus. Too much heaviness in our steps and goals and souls and bodies. God damnit people, learn from the motherfucking hippies! Shit.

Perhaps I swear so much because I’m talking to myself, or because so much and so little has changed since a time when I wasn’t alive and because it is important to remember and distinguish those similarities and differences. Or perhaps it is because of this obscene out-of-body-egoism that seems to be the only form of freedom left, a horrible falseness where one’s image substitutes itself for one's life and livings… individually and institutionally.

In singing we use our voices, and in singing together, in screaming what democracy looks like, we can recreate it. And that’s why we need new songs to go with the old ones, and new projects to go with the songs, and “Hey you! You should teach an EXCO class, the priority deadline is April 6. Check it out at www.EXCOtc.org”.

And the Summer of Love didn’t get it right; neither did the May of 1968. And perhaps history will tell us we didn’t get it right, but it is up to us to get it done…and by that I mean the revolution. Small goals, mind you, small goals!—making up new songs and making revolution.

And you should know that I’m serious about all this; I’ve talked to two experts about it this week, one radical and one professional nonprofiteer no less, and both tell me that my plans are realistic. And why not? We’re here. There's rocks, there's trees, there's birds, there's squirrels. Come on, we'll bless them all until we get vashnigyered [drunk]!—or until the State or capital decides that they know what democracy looks like…us bleeding in the road.

On Self-Education is missing...

If anyone has a copy I'd be grateful to have a chance to type it up/post it...(it is number 5 of this series).

Thanx, db

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 4 of 7: Against Peace

This is the finale of the negative part of this series. Yay! If you haven’t read until now, this is the one to read, so that you can understand what I mean in the next few articles, instead of warping them back into liberal stupidity.

A few weeks ago I participated in a march through the skyways of downtown Minneapolis initiated by the Local 26 Janitors Union (SEIU), who paraded through the skyways during lunchtime, reasserted their presence, importance, and power over the spaces they clean; spaces that were constructed to exclude them.

A largely Latino union, chants were in many languages and drew heavily on the still ongoing immigrant rights struggle. A bright day, a happy mob clogging up the lunch bags of the wealthy; smiles, cheers, chants, dedication, hope, struggle...and a recent victory with a new contract that includes, among other things, affordable family health insurance.

My favorite chant went like this. “No Justice? No Peace!” “No Justice?? No Peace!!” and on and on. Occasionally a shouter would change the first would from “Justice” to “Health Care,” emphasizing the partial nature of their current campaign, its demands, and its potential justice. “No Justice? No Peace!” This is my argument.

And I am writing to people invested in being stupid liberals and sedated by the false promises of the status quo. Those who exist anxiously between expressing support for resistance and demanding that it be crushed with incredible violence. Those who are too unsure to make real political decisions, who can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

And just as nonprofits are the key obstruction to any attempt at a just alternative, so are liberals the key barrier to any sort of justice. Why? Because they strategically immobilize themselves in defense of their privilege. Because in their humanitarian obsessions, their gut reaction driven I’m-like-mother-teresa-but-I-fuck righteous politics they invest themselves and the status quo with moral authority. Because they are all talk and no walk and spend their time learning to drive, not to organize. Seduced and blinded by privilege, made hypocritical by hope, made dangerous by their identification with authority and their corresponding moral or cynical righteousness, made pathetic, guilty, and impotent in their waffling courage.

Of course we who grew up as liberals, who were fed false promises with breasts, had no choice but to believe them. And in growing up we could not at first accept them as lies. And now, even after experience has demanded that we acknowledge their falsehood, most of us remain too desensitized to their destruction, too alienated from hope to see the depth of liberalism’s emptiness.

Let us move beyond apathetic infancy; let us rediscover the paths or questions to hope. Of course adults hardly help in this regard, deceiving either to keep Santa alive or saying that he never existed. Of course they live like he is dead or never existed anyway, but not the good Santa. It is the Bad Santa, the liberal Santa that they live out. Perhaps this is why that particular movie is so enjoyable to watch…is it not the incarnation of an obvious yet forever hidden truth? That Santa is an asshole?

What is important is not so called belief or unbelief but the belief by which we can live. It is only by creation, by acting out a system that embodies something qualitatively better that we can live out what could be called justice.And let us point out here the centerpiece of Hollywood’s false turns, the ideology of love that conquers all, that individualizes our problems, and transforms a desire for something better into the reproduction of society as it stands.

The fact that love is seen as a solution precisely when liberal values collapse results in love as an escape from the world, making unpolitical our own lives and bodies, when these things are the only part of politics worth keeping and the ground from which new worlds will be born. Nor can the current system and its institutions birth a qualitatively improved world, invested as it is in systematically aborting the living. It will propagate horrific violence to prevent transformation, it will seduce and co-opt nonprofits and liberals into justifying itself, it will alienate those very same liberals from power, what is called politics…insofar as they participate in it, it remains structurally beyond them.

But it is not structurally beyond us. And it is here that we may discover new words to call for, new words and goals and desires to fight for what is now called “peace” and “justice”. And because liberals use their notions of “peace” and “violence” to obscure what is and should be done, our search will turn around the word in which they are empty, what is now called “justice”. That, however, is for the three articles to come.

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Bleached and Don’t You Mess With Language Like That! (A last note from the author) As a bleached person I am seriously offended that Ian Boswell would say that it is “curious and mildly hypocritical” that a student calling white students bleached at the Spike Lee talk “has gone unnoticed and uncommitted on in a time when all kinds of people are sounding off about an ephemeral racist presence on campus.” My ancestors worked their asses off to become bleached and I am damn pissed that anyone might not recognize this effort (with its ugly consequences), especially because for most of them this happened within the last 60-90 years. Damn the man who speaks rudely without an attempt to know anything about what he is saying. It remains ironic that Sir Boswell would use rudeness and ignorance in an attempt to cover up albeit in a small way a history of oppression and ideology. Next Week’s Topic: On Self-Education

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 3 of 7: Against Politics

Politics in this country is currently a means through which certain people mask their own interests through the language of the common good. Worse, this is done to intentionally prevent others from being heard or speaking at all. This article will discuss this at two levels: 1) the hypocritical discourse of political correctness and 2) last week’s open faculty letter.

Political correctness is a hypocritical discourse because it pretends to support racial equality while preventing any action that would support such equality. Inaugurated in the 1960s to replace an equality of result with an equality of what-can-be-said-in-polite-conversation political correctness has been mobilized by liberals to attack the overt racism of conservatives and cover up their own lack of real commitment to racial equality.

Originally used to prevent increasing investment in deep inequalities, this language of covert racism has over the past 25 years been used to deepen inequalities. And while political correctness is unpleasant, responding by being politically incorrect is a hurtful and privileged way to cope with its existence; it celebrates the racism on which PC is founded, as we who attended the forum last Tuesday learned for ourselves. Destroying PC without legitimating racism requires destroying its roots in political economy, not the deceptive speech that misdirects us from institutional racism...and our own. I think about my high school and its celebrated liberalism, its sincere multicultural mouthing, while at the same time running a tracking system that sent upper (middle) class whites or Asians to schools like Mac, sent middle class whites and blacks to state schools, and sent the large group of lower class blacks as well as lower class whites, Asians, and Latinos nowhere, or to prison. And I grew up in a “liberal bubble.”

Then I think of Macalester. Macalester has the same false liberalism, the same sincere, empty talk. But, due to an event that allows us to begin to learn what this means, we have an opportunity to make significant institutional (and personal) changes to transform this hypocrisy.
We will now turn to the faculty letter and the hypocrisy on which it stands. Ridiculously enough, this letter was supported by the MacWeekly’s editorial board. I quote “[the faculty letter] eloquently and correctly establishes what has gone unsaid for too long: pursuing pre-eminence has always been integral to Macalester’s mission, and that pursuit and social consciousness are by no means mutually exclusive.” This is bullshit. Let us explore why.

The first clue is that the professors associated with or engaged in social activism did not sign this letter. Those who did are well served by the status quo and wish to expand it, to make Macalester a “pre-eminent institution.” When used in this way, pre-eminence or excellence in education means elitism in education, a maximization built on current oppressions and inequalities, and a refusal to challenge them—an embodiment of the hypocrisy that is political correctness. Worse, the faculty admonished students for speaking their concerns, first, by calling them part of a disease that gets rid of presidents, without mentioning that these presidents were booted for things like arguing that women are inherently inferior at math and science, as was the case at Harvard. Second, the letter said that the clear and direct arguments from students are beyond the realm of appropriate discourse. In such a logic only what is sanctioned is appropriate. This is not acceptable. Only ideological self-interest could so blind these faculty to their letter’s ridiculousness. Last but not least, to demonstrate a history of commitment to pre-eminence as the faculty does is a historical argument, not an ethical one. Just as one cannot justify the continued oppression of the lower classes by mentioning serfdom, slavery, and sharecropping, so one cannot argue for the ethics of pre-eminence by citing its existence in previous administrative documents.

If we are going to move away from the elitism and PC in which we find ourselves, the unacknowledged racism and classism (etc) that found the status quo, if we are ever going to consider what real excellence in education might mean we need to 1) acknowledge our hypocrisy and 2) begin asking different questions. Instead of asking: how many sweet speakers can we pay boatloads of money to provide us with ‘prestige’ and a smidgen of education, let us ask what type of school would make sweet speakers volunteer to speak, or want to teach? What type of school with what type of students might incite passionately ethical people like Kofi Annan, Toni Morrison or Spike Lee to inquire about speaking or teaching for a semester? Luckily for all of us, ethics is not only constituted after the fact.

We have an opportunity, here and now, to do what it takes to begin dismantling the hypocritical notions of political correctness and educational excellence as they now stand. We have the opportunity to learn from those who know more than ourselves and help as we are able, to do good on the suffering from which we have benefited and the oppression with which we collaborate when we do nothing. We have an opportunity to participate in creating a place like what Macalester was supposed to be, and discover real educational excellence in the process. We have an opportunity to be part of a movement that has begun here at Macalester to make good on the promises of ideologies…by destroying them.